The lumberman heard the invitation. The tone
was deep with a gentleness he had never before discovered
in it. And in his wonder he craned to see who
it was who had inspired it.

Bull moved aside.

It was then that Bat started up from his chair, and
a sharp ejaculation broke from him. Nancy McDonald
was standing framed in the doorway.

CHAPTER XXIII

NANCY

Bat was hurrying down the woodland trail. For
once in his hard life he knew the meaning of rank
cowardice. The sight of Nancy McDonald had completely
robbed him of the last vestige of courage. The
atmosphere of the office, that room so crowded with
absorbing memories for him, had suddenly seemed to
threaten suffocation. He felt he must get out.
He must seek the cold, crisp air of the world he knew
and understood. So he had fled.

Now he was alone with a riot of thought that was almost
chaotic. There was only one thing that stood
out clearly, definitely, in his mind. It was
the Nemesis of the thing that had happened. It
was Nemesis with a vengeance.

His busy jaws worked furiously under his emotion.
He spat, and spat again, into the soft white snow.
Once he stopped abruptly and gazed back over the circuitous
trail. It was as though he must look again upon
the thing that had so deeply stirred him, as though
he must look upon it to reassure himself that he was
not dreaming. That the thing had driven him headlong
was real, and not some troublesome hallucination.

Nancy McDonald! The beautiful stepdaughter of
Leslie Standing, with her red hair and pretty eyes,
was the agent of the Skandinavia, paid to wreck the
great work he and Leslie had set up. She was paid
to achieve the destruction at—­any cost.

It was amazing. It was overwhelming. It
was even—­terrible.

He pursued his way with hurried steps. And as
he went his mind leapt back to the time when he had
made his great appeal for the poor, deserted child
shut up in the coldly correct halls of Marypoint College.
What an irony it all seemed now. Then he remembered
her first coming to Sachigo, and the mystery of the
letter from Father Adam heralding her arrival.
He had understood the moment Nancy had announced her
name to him on the quay. He had understood the
thought, the hope which had inspired the letter.

In his rugged heart he had welcomed the letter which
Father Adam had written. He had welcomed the
girl’s first coming to the place he felt should
be her inheritance. He had seen in those things
the promise of the belated justice for which years
ago he had appealed. Father Adam had asked Bull
to receive her well. Why? There was only
one answer to that in the lumberman’s mind.
Father Adam had seen her. He understood her beauty,
and had fallen for it. What more reasonable then
that Bull should do the same.